cyberstatesTechnology workers are well paid in Washington state, with Seattle area entrepreneur and Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi telling us earlier this year that learning computer programming is the fastest way “to join the one percent.”

Now, here’s some evidence to that effect. According to the annual Cyberstates report from the TechAmerica foundation, tech workers in Washington state earned an average annual wage of $110,200.

That’s a pretty hefty sum, placing Washington in third place in terms of tech wages behind California ($123,900) and Massachusetts ($116,000). It’s also up from 2011 when Washington tech workers on average earned $105,500.

Nationally, the tech industry paid an annual average wage of $93,800 in 2012, which is 98 percent more than the average private sector wage of $47,400. Not bad, and one of the reasons why folks like Partovi are pushing to get more kids learning computer science skills.

Washington state employed 191,000 tech workers in 2012 (ranked 10th), representing 8.2 percent of the workforce. That was the fifth highest concentration of tech workers in the country, behind Virginia, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maryland. The state added roughly 2,100 jobs in the tech industry last year.

Nationally, tech jobs increased by 1.1 percent, with 5.95 million working in the industry.

Matthew Kazmierczak, Vice President of the TechAmerica Foundation and author of Cyberstates, said that Washington’s tech industry “benefits from its strong tech cluster in software services.” The state continues to boast the most software publishing jobs in the country at 51,700 workers.

That’s still largely tied to Microsoft, though other companies such as Amazon.com, Tableau and F5 networks are growing rapidly. The arrival of engineering offices from the likes of eBay, Splunk and others also is helping to drive those numbers.

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